LinuxWorld Conference Draws Penguin Lovers to SF

By John K. Waters

08/08/2005

The LinuxWorld Conference and Expo is underway in San Francisco (running Aug.
8 to Aug. 11). With 11,000 registered attendees, traffic is down slightly from
last year (11,400), but exhibitors are up from about 180 to 200, according to
event organizers IDG World Expo.

Here are the highlights:

- Microsoft is leading a session. Yes, the Great Anti-Linux! Microsoft’s
director of platform technology strategy, Bill Hilf, will lead "Managing
Linux in a Mixed Environment...at Microsoft?" with "A look inside
the Linux/Open Source Software lab at Microsoft."

- Google's open source programs manager, Chris DiBona, will participate in
a panel, “The Explosive Growth of Linux and Open Source: What does it
all mean?” That panel, part of the "State of the Open Source Union"
keynote, will include moderator Stuart Cohen, the CEO of Open Source Development
Labs; David Patrick, general manager of the Linux Open Source Platforms and
Services group at Novell; Eben Moglen, chair of the Software Freedom Law Center;
and Tom Rabon, EVP of corporate affairs at Red Hat.

- Novell will formally launch the Open SuSE project, which opens the company's
recently acquired Linux OS to community-based development. “We’ve
moving from a closed development methodology, where betas were held privately
and no one could contribute except by invitation,” Greg Mancusi-Ungaro,
director of marketing for Linux and open source at Novell, tells AppTrends,
“to a transparent and open methodology, where the development builds and
the beta infrastructure is visible to all.”

- Hewlett-Packard may announce it is opening four new Linux expertise centers
to help software makers support Red Hat Enterprise Server.

- Red Hat is expected to roll out a strategy to "outline our progress
in available offerings in the security space and set technical and business
investment plan in the security space for the coming years," the company
says.

- Business Objects is bringing its BusinessObjects XI platform to Linux, the
company says, to "allow customers to use the...BI platform on the OS of
their choice."

- EnterpriseDB is expected to release EnterpriseDB 2005, an enterprise-class
relational database management system designed to support update-intensive,
high-volume applications.

- OpenLogic is announcing BlueGlue, an application designed to automate the
installation, configuration, integration, testing and management of certified
and supported stacks built from customer-specified combinations of more than
100 leading open-source projects.

- JasperSoft will demo JasperReports DBA Dashboard for MySQL, designed to let
administrators monitor performance and use while identifying problems across
an unlimited number of MySQL database servers.

In a Forrester Research survey in May, respondents ranked Linux third, behind
Windows Server 2000/2003 and IBM z/OS, as an OS they consider strategic. And
26 of the 56 respondents said they are using Linux in their data centers.

IDC expects worldwide sales of open-source applications, tools and system software
running on Linux to increase from $5.4 billion in 2005 to nearly $17 billion
in 2009.

About the Author

John K. Waters is a freelance writer based in Silicon Valley. He can be reached
at john@watersworks.com.